CA has upgraded several management software products to better supervise virtualized software assets and has introduced CA Spectrum Service Assurance as a new product.

The management console of CA Spectrum Service Assurance r1.1 displays both the physical and virtual parts of the infrastructure, maps them, and helps identify trouble spots as they develop, said Stephen Elliot, VP of business unit strategy for CA's Systems and Network Management unit.

CA Spectrum Service Assurance offers visualization of system data in simple-to-read charts and diagrams and enhanced analytics for pinpointing causes of slowdowns or outages. The new product is available immediately and is priced starting at $175,000, with integration of up to five system management data sources, Elliot said.

CA Spectrum Automation Manager is available in a new 11.7 release aimed at centralizing application configuration management. It can also manage the dynamic provisioning of physical or virtual machines. The 11.7 release supports VMware's vSphere 4 for generating enterprise virtual environments. It can also manage IBM LPAR or logical partitioning on the mainframe, which creates virtual machine units, or Sun Microsystems Solaris' Containers and Sun virtual machines run by the xVM hypervisor, Citrix Systems XenServer or Microsoft's Hyper-V.

CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is available immediately at a price starting at $150,000 for a system running on 150 processors.

CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 has been upgraded to monitor the performance health of both data and voice networks, physical and virtual servers, databases, and client/server applications across both physical and virtual environments. This release can discover and map VMware ESX hypervisor hosts and the virtual machines running on them and collect metrics related to maintaining performance at benchmarked levels. It also includes an energy usage component as an additional monitored element, Elliot said.

CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is available immediately at a price of $205,000.

Also upgraded was CA's Insight Database Peroformance Manager r11.3, designed to monitor DB2 across Linux, Unix and Windows. It also now monitors Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase systems, whether they are running in physical or virtual environments.

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